PORT ANNA

An exile returns home to a little town on the coast of Maine in Buck’s gently fantastical debut.

Gwen Gilmore last stayed in her family’s summer house in Port Anna, a “village at the edge of the world,” almost 25 years ago, when she was a teenager, the year that her younger sister, Molly, drowned. Her mother has Alzheimer’s disease, her boyfriend dumped her, and she’s lost her job as an English professor in North Carolina. Back at Periwinkle Cottage, now plagued with several decades worth of dust and damage, she reunites with several friends from high school as well as the folksy older residents of the town, becomes involved with the search for a missing high school student, meets a hunky Argentinian artist with “kaleidoscope eyes,” restarts the writing career she abandoned, attempts to fend off a smarmy real estate developer who has eyes for the land on which her house sits, and finally confronts the guilt she feels for her sister’s death. She is aided in her various quests by the well-intentioned ghosts of “the Misses,” two Bryn Mawr professors who shared their lives and the summer house for decades, and by some mysterious seals who may or may not have a connection to the heroic lighthouse keeper who gave the town its name. Magical realism aside, the plot sometimes strains credulity: Gwen, otherwise intelligent, naïvely accepts a refinancing deal and a warm bedroom from the real estate mogul, and the solution to her problems depends on an unlikely coincidence. But readers looking for an escape to coastal Maine, with both its bucolic and forbidding moods, will find that here, along with the depiction of a community where everybody minds everybody else’s business, and a touch of romance.

A reassuring look at making peace with a rocky past and place.